Transcript

GARY BAKI Yes yes, it's difficult. When we did the winding down of the actual amnesty period in about a week ago our local population had been told directly that we know that there are still some weapons that have not been surrendered during the period of amnesty and that they are still requested to surrender those weapons, despite the fact that the amnesty has expired, because phase two of the operations, which is actually commencing now and that is going to be targeted operations, meaning that based on the available information and intelligence to us we will go directly and hit those people that we believe have firearms and have not surrendered them during the period of amnesty.

JOHNNY BLADES: Will you maintain a bit of an increased deployment up there through until the general elections?

GB: Yes, we will maintain presence there leading up into the elections. Not the current number but on a reduced size over there but the enforcement will be still the same until we get into the elections.

JB: So with the elections, I think there's going to be about 10,000 police deployed across the country?

GB: Yes, actually 9,600 police personnel will be deployed, including 1000 personnel: 500 from the defence and another 500 from the correctional service that will assist police. We will be having a final brief with all the regional commanders on Thursday - I will be having that - and that's to see where they are in terms of their planning. I've just finished a meeting with our people in headquarters and the next thing now is to source the funding from treasury to support our personnel on the ground. Elections operations is going to be totally different because I have given the responsibility back to the regional commanders to run their divisions, rather than dictated from headquarters.

JB: Right, so that's different from previous elections: the provincial police heads will be in charge in those provinces rather than HQ in the capital?

GB: Yes.

JB: Do you think that's going to work out? Obviously the ballot boxes, there's a lot of worries about how they might be manipulated. I suppose the police will be crucial won't they in securing the ballots?

GB: It's really not an issue about having one policeman or ten policemen or five policemen to every polling booth. We are there to provide the environment. The people need to also assist the police and the security personnel in terms of the entire elections security. Basically attributes also to the way that people behave, so where there is a breach of the processes then we step in. If there is no breach we allowed it to go but when there are issues that are beyond the control of the electoral commission then we will have to decide what is the best approach to deal with the situation. It's going to be challenging but the issue is this: we are not leaving our...commanders alone there. There will be a response unit posted to hot-spots, where we consider likely issues of trouble to occur, so they will have supportive personnel deployed from headquarters to support them.